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At the Lean Kanban France 2014 conference Bjarte Bogsnes gave a keynote presentation about beyond budgeting. In his presentation he talked about the problems with traditional management and how transparency and self regulating management comes to the rescue, and the principles and practices of beyond budgeting.

When organizations decide to scale agile they can be looking for agile ways to define strategies, manage direction and sustain alignment. Deploying and stay aligned, is today's challenge said Pierre Neis. At the Lean Kanban France 2014 conference Pierre showed how using Hoshin Kanri has helped global players in their lean agile transition.

Software Development is often considered to be knowledge intensive, therefor organizations look for ways to enable continuous learning. “We need learning organisations and they start with learning individuals” says Marcin Floryan. Individual learning can be difficult and scaling individual learning even more challenging. What can organizations do to become a continuous learning organization?

In stead of feature farming, we need to deliver better outcomes and focus on the business results that we need to deliver. Measurements should provide insight into the outcomes because that is what is important. The Mobius loop can be used to define appropriate measurements.

Blockades in work, like insufficient information, unclear requirements or having to wait for tools or systems to become available can have a systematic cause. It could be the case that similar problems that block the team keep happening until the underlying causes are addressed. You can use your blockades as treasures of improvement to sustainably improve the way work is done.

In agile projects the product owner is often seen as the person who primary assures the connection between business and IT. But for effective IT-Business alignment having a product owner is not enough. What can people from the business, demand and supply parts of the organization do increase the effectiveness of IT – Business alignment?

Agile retrospectives are mostly done at the team level or at a project level. What if you need to conduct a retrospective with 50 teams or more? Luke Hohmann describes how a large scale agile transformation project did a huge retrospective to create insight on what was going well and what needed to be improved.

Developing and delivering products which customers don’t want and for which there is no market can be costly. Agile can help you to efficiently develop products, but you need to know what to build. How can you find out which products your customers need?

Jan-Joost Bouwman and Mark Heistek, from ING Retail Banking Netherlands, presented at Devopsdays Amsterdam how a CMMI-ITIL organization transitioned to a more agile mindset. Somewhat unusually in this kind of sessions, ING presented quantitative evidence of the improvements, such as a marked increase in the number of changes deployed to production and a decrease of the risk value per change.

At the Agile Governance conference in Amsterdam Jan van Santbrink presented how architecture when used with an agile mindset can play a key role in governance. InfoQ interviewed Jan about why agile and architecture need to collaborate, how architecture can support agile decision taking and the benefits for development of doing architecture.

Andrew Craddock will give a talk at the Agile Governance conference May 13 in Amsterdam about properly governed Agile projects. InfoQ did an interview with him about what agile governance is and why you need to embed governance practices into your agile development process.

Entrepreneurs using lean startup can work with investors to raise capital for their business. Business plans from lean startups often differ from traditional startups and lean startup encourages learning from failure and to pivot, which might scare off investors. Can entrepreneurs and investors together use the lean startup approach to do fundraising?

Experimentation using for instance lean startup can help you learn about your customers and find out which features and product would be valuable. The value however comes from building products and actually delivering them to customers. You need to find ways to balance between experimentation and delivery.

Several approaches exist to improve software development, among them are agile and lean. Managers have to decide which approaches to deploy in their organization. Approaches can also be combined depending on the problems that need to be solved. InfoQ interviewed Régis Medina about combining agile and lean, focusing on people and learning.